Trump rally at The Expo at World Market Center on Sept. 13, 2024. (Photo: April Corbin Girnus/Nevada Current)
Between attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris and haranguing the media for what he saw as a rigged primetime debate, former President Donald Trump used much of his Las Vegas rally on Friday night to stoke fears about immigrants.
The Republican nominee for president repeatedly claimed that under the Biden-Harris administration hyperbolic numbers of immigrants have poured into the United States to take American jobs, rape and murder women and children, get transgender surgery, vote in elections, take over whole apartment buildings to house their gangs, and “conquer our country.”
“We have thousands and thousands and thousands of terrorists coming into our country,” Trump declared. He claimed immigrants are coming from other countries’ prisons, jails, mental institutions, and insane asylums.
“Kamala would be the president of invasion,” said Trump, “and I will be the president of making this country stronger, better, more beautiful, bigger, more powerful, wealthier, safer than ever before.”
He promised that, if given a second term, there will be mass deportations. Parts of the country — including Aurora, Colorado — need to be “liberated” from migrant gangs that have taken over, he said.
The Trump campaign estimated 6,000 supporters attended the rally at The Expo at World Market Center in downtown Las Vegas. It marked Trump’s first public event in Nevada since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. (A visit to a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas three weeks ago was closed to the public.)
Anti-immigrant rhetoric came up repeatedly during his remarks, which stretched longer than an hour. At one point, Trump recited “The Snake,” a song whose lyrics tell a fable of a tender woman who helps a half-frozen snake only to get bitten by the poisonous creature. In the lyrics, the woman asks the snake why it bit her when she’d saved it, and the snake replies, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!”
Trump has spun the song into a warning about immigration, telling the crowd in Las Vegas it was “very accurate to what is happening in this country.”
“The Snake” was a staple of his rallies during his first presidential campaign in 2016.
Image brought up on screens during Donald Trump’s rally in Las Vegas Friday. (Photo: April Corbin Girnus/Nevada Current)
On video screens flanking the stage, the campaign displayed images connecting immigrants to crime. In one, labeled “The Harris plan for sex traffickers,” a red carpet leads to open gates at the U.S. border. Another read “no one is safe with Kamala’s open borders” and featured a man with a weapon lurking behind a woman in a dark alley. A third showed a group of tattooed Latino men and read “your new apartment managers if Kamala’s re-elected.”
Trump referenced real crimes involving immigrants, including an alleged abduction in Virginia earlier this month. He also made reference to Springfield, Ohio — a community that was thrust into the spotlight during the presidential debate earlier in the week when Trump falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants are “eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Trump criticized the moderators of the debate, who had fact checked him in real time and pointed out that city leaders in Springfield have said there are no credible claims of pets being eaten by immigrants. (Trump’s response to the fact check was that he “saw it on tv.”) He also repeated a false claim that has circulated online suggesting Harris wore an earpiece and might have been fed answers.
At one point, Trump paused his speech to air a video clip of Harris happily laughing and saying “thank you” repeatedly to a crowd of her supporters, calling her behavior “weird.” Before Trump went on stage, video screens at the venue displayed a screenshot of a 2017 headline referencing Harris as the first Indian-American to serve in the U.S. Senate. (Harris is Black and Indian American.)
Trump brought out on stage with him Sam Brown, the Republican challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen. Trump praised Brown, saying he was committed to being “a border senator” to his “border president.” Brown gave Trump a copy of his memoir.
Other Trump supporters who spoke at the event included Nevada Republican Party chair Michael McDonald, Clark County Republican Party chair Jesse Law, right-wing radio personality Wayne Allen Root, “Pawn Stars” personality Rick Harrison, UFC fighter and Olympic gold medalist Henry Cejudo, and Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii.